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Mistakes, printing defects, reused woodcuts and low-quality paper are often the result of strategies enabled by printers and publishers to offer printed material at a low price while balancing profit/loss in their daily activities. It was precisely due to these strategies that a wider class of population could read, sing, learn and enjoy life in early modern Europe. This essay illustrates the preliminary results of a comparative analysis aimed at investigating the production phase of cheap books and prints all over Europe. With a focus on editorial strategies, printing practices and materials commonly adopted and used in these publications, it demonstrates that European publishers and printers followed very similar patterns while producing cheap products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compare the different existing approaches to advance health care directives within the European context, and to explore the possibility of reaching a deeper consensus among countries on this subject. To this end, it first discusses the shortcomings of Article 9 of the Council of Europe's Biomedicine Convention. Second, it offers a comparative analysis of the legal status of advance directives in a number of European countries. Finally, it presents the conclusions of an international interdisciplinary workshop focused on this topic that was held in Zurich in June 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the first legally binding international instrument in the field of bioethics, was adopted in November 1996. In the present paper, following a brief overview of some of the Convention's provisions likely to conflict with national enactments already in effect, we shall attempt, on the basis of the materials available in the International Digest of Health Legislation, to analyse the positions adopted by the different states involved and to identify foreseeable conflicts, focusing on the following four issues: human genome; protection of the embryo; scientific research; and protection of live organ donors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the right to health care. Various expressions of this right may be distinguished. These include both individual rights and social rights which could be based upon international treaties and constitutional rights. They may be found in national health legislation and, in some cases, in jurisprudence. To analyze the consequences of limiting the right to health care, a framework for judicial review has been developed which encompasses these expressions of the right to health care. The framework was used to examine legal and health policy developments in three Western and two Eastern European countries. In Italy and the Netherlands the right to health care is protected constitutionally (but on differing legal bases) while the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. In contrast, Hungary and Poland have for many years seen the state take responsible for the provision, administration and allocation of health care services and the right to health care was guaranteed theoretically but not in practice because of the lack of (financial) means. However, the Polish Constitution explicitly anticipates possible limitations of the right to health care. What all these countries have in common is a cost containment perspective where the future will bring even tighter limits on what resources patients may consume. Despite differences in legal structure between these countries, where they seem to converge is on the consequences of putting limitations on the right to health care. The courts in Italy, the Netherlands and the UK have formulated conditions drawn from the acceptance that this right has to be judged within the context of limited resources. It may be concluded that finding a compromise between the right to health care and cost containment policies could also be an issue, Eastern European countries will have to face in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Condition of democracy continue to be discussed for parts of the world. The inter-war period in Europe with some of the most dramatic breakdowns of democratic systems, provides an interesting "laboratory" for systematic investigation in this respect. This paper summarizes the major findings of a large international research project covering 18 European states. It presents and discusses broader social structural, political cultural, institutional, etc, conditions of democracy against which the impact of the world economic of the world economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the respective social and electoral reactions, the political moves of major actor and the final survival or breakdown of parliamentary regimes are assessed. It employs both macro-quantitative and macro-qualitative methods in a cross-sectional and, as far as possible, longitudinal manner. In this way in a "quasi-experimental " systematic comparative design "stricture-" and "actor-oriented" approaches, i.e, the "opportunity-set" and the actual choice and outcomes are brought into a common perspective. The results points to interesting application to the present situation in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]